Tokushima prefecture published LibreOffice manuals under CC BY 4.0

A small LibreOffice related news from Japan.

Tokushima prefecture (their English page / Wikipedia), located Shikoku-island in Japan, published their own LibreOffice manuals (in Japanese) under CC BY 4.0 license.


Their migration to LibreOffice is quite an old news.  Japanese journalist already reported it (in Japanese) on August 2013.

Tokushima prefecture had been used OpenOffice.org several years ago with some proprietary software (e.g., Microsoft Office and Ichitaro; Japanese local office suite word processor developed by Justsystems, in Tokushima Pref.) licenses.

Since January 2014, they decided to use LibreOffice as a their primary office software, and not to renew license contracts of their proprietary office software.  The license fee they could reduce was estimated almost 100 million JPY.


And now, they just published their manuals which has been used for their LibreOffice migration.

Here is the rough translation of their comment on the publication page:

Tokushima prefecture utilizes LibreOffice as a fee-free usable office suite.We already created operation manuals for our employees to apply everyday works, and now we decided to publish them on our website to let residents know strength to use fee-free LibreOffice well.  Please use the manual anyone who has an interest, or who want to use LibreOffice but don't know how to use it.

Cool stuff.

They are not first end-user in Japan to publish their own manual under the public license.  JA Fukuoka city (in Japanese), the farmers' union in Fukuoka-city (in Kyushu island) also have published their own LibreOffice manuals (basics / advanced / macros) under CC BY NC 2.1 since December 2011.


Of course we, LibreOffice global community, already has tons of nice manuals/documents/videos as well, but unfortunately using English documents is a little hard for Japanese casual users.
I personally hope we would like to translate global materials into Japanese, but in parallel, it also would be nice that end-users create their own manuals (with community help) and publish them under the public license.

Thanks Tokushima prefecture, and JA Fukuoka city!